Technical Field
This invention pertains to the field of data processing and networking, particularly to techniques for connecting tasks of parallelized programs running on multi-stage manycore processor with each other as well as with external parties with high resource efficiency and high data processing throughput rate.
Descriptions of the Related Art
Traditionally, advancements in computing technologies have fallen into two categories. First, in the field conventionally referred to as high performance computing, the main objective has been maximizing the processing speed of one given computationally intensive program running on a dedicated hardware comprising a large number of parallel processing elements. Second, in the field conventionally referred to as utility or cloud computing, the main objective has been to most efficiently share a given pool of computing hardware resources among a large number of user application programs. Thus, in effect, one branch of computing technology advancement effort has been seeking to effectively use a large number of parallel processors to accelerate execution of a single application program, while another branch of the effort has been seeking to efficiently share a single pool of computing capacity among a large number of user applications to improve the utilization of the computing resources.
However, there have not been any major synergies between these two efforts; often, pursuing any one of these traditional objectives rather happens at the expense of the other. For instance, it is clear that a practice of dedicating an entire parallel processor based (super) computer per individual application causes severely sub-optimal computing resource utilization, as much of the capacity would be idling much of the time. On the other hand, seeking to improve utilization of computing systems by sharing their processing capacity among a number of user applications using conventional technologies will cause non-deterministic and compromised performance for the individual applications, along with security concerns.
As such, the overall cost-efficiency of computing is not improving as much as any nominal improvements toward either of the two traditional objectives would imply: traditionally, single application performance maximization comes at the expense of system utilization efficiency, while overall system efficiency maximization comes at the expense of performance of by the individual application programs. There thus exists a need for a new parallel computing architecture, which, at the same time, enables increasing the speed of executing application programs, including through execution of a given application in parallel across multiple processor cores, as well as improving the utilization of the computing resources available, thereby maximizing the collective application processing throughput for a given cost budget.
Moreover, even outside traditional high performance computing, the application program performance requirements will increasingly be exceeding the processing throughput achievable from a single central processing unit (CPU) core, e.g. due to the practical limits being reached on the CPU clock rates. This creates an emerging requirement for intra-application parallel processing (at ever finer grades) also for mainstream software programs (i.e. applications not traditionally considered high performance computing). Notably, these internally parallelized mainstream enterprise and web applications will be largely deployed on dynamically shared cloud computing infrastructure. Accordingly, the emerging form of mainstream computing calls for technology innovation supporting the execution of large number of internally parallelized applications on dynamically shared resource pools, such as manycore processors.
Furthermore, conventional microprocessor and computer system architectures use significant portions of their computation capacity (e.g. CPU cycles or core capacity of manycore arrays) for handling input and output (IO) communications to get data transferred between a given processor system and external sources or destinations as well as between different stages of processing within the given system. For data volume intensive computation workloads and/or manycore processor hardware with high IO bandwidth needs, the portion of computation power spent on IO and data movements can be particularly high. To allow using maximized portion of the computing capacity of processors for processing the application programs and application data (rather than for system functions such as IO data movements), architectural innovations are also needed in the field of manycore processor IO subsystems. In particular, there is a need for a new manycore processor system data flow and IO architecture whose operation, while providing high IO data throughput performance, causes little or no overhead in terms of usage of the computation units of the processor.